


instar

by dundee998



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 12:36:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10786875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dundee998/pseuds/dundee998
Summary: Masky + Hoody | practicecreated using babeltwo's #mhrandomgenerator





	instar

Brian appears at Tim’s house one dark and stormy night. Tim isn’t home, just a thing wearing his bones, and there isn’t much of Brian here either, just a face used to smiling gone gaunt and drawn and desperate. He’s soaked to the bone, filthy and stinking and he doesn’t have words; there’s a thick jagged scar across his neck, and a plea for help in his wide, wild eyes.

Tim isn’t home. A thing wearing his bones is. In a few hours, Tim will come back. But the thing doesn’t turn away those who seek sanctuary. The thing welcomes the outcast into the home it does not own, gives it a towel to dry off. The mercy of it makes him sob soundlessly. The thing rubs his back in little circles.

Brian reaches for a notepad and a permanent marker, writes with painstaking focus; his hands are burned and sensitive. “what is happening to me?” The thing takes the notepad and writes a reply:

YOU ARE INSTAR

YOU ARE NOT YOU

I CAN GIVE YOU THE EGGTOOTH

BREAK OUT

Brian, or something halfway between Brian and something else, puts a red-cracked hand on Tim’s hand. The thing smiles with Tim’s mouth, and leads him to another place.

Eggtooth: a cranial protuberance designed to help natal creatures break free of their eggs. The thing that is in Tim shows Brian its tooth. A cheap white mask, darkened with stinking ink, a smooth lovely face to hide the innocent Tim from what his occupant intends to view. Then they make Brian’s. He chooses a soft black t-shirt from Tim’s laundry, still smelling like smoke and sweat, and they cut it to shape, burn eyes into it with sharp bleach.

Brian puts on his tooth, and breaks out of his egg. Something else stares out through the cotton. The bleaching process created a wide, thin frown on this new face, but the thing that was Brian smiles underneath. It is free of its shell.

\---------

Skin is clumsy on its feet now; it cannot use its eyes like it used to, with this blurring obstruction. Tooth has to teach it how to listen with its body, how to feel balance in its ears and the heat of the ground through its feet and the life of the trees that will shield it while it carries out its tasks.

It is a difficult lesson, and Tooth loses patience, abandons it to find its own way back, and when it does eventually peer fretfully through an unlatched window to the place where Tooth lives with its host, Tooth is gone, and Tim stalks his home cursing and crying and clutching at his hair.

Skin walks on silent feet, all sound erased from its world. Muffled cotton, muffled breath, and all it needs is a muffle for its hands still so raw and red and breaking with blood. Before it leaves Tim’s house for the last time, it takes a pair of good, thick black gloves. Skin settles into its skin, and makes for the trees


End file.
